Put the flow back in workflow with Dropbox Extensions

When I started my career at Microsoft, Office was in its heyday and would continue to dominate the productivity space for decades. But the world has changed—the cloud has ushered in a new generation of productivity tools, and employees have more and better applications to choose from than ever before. According to one survey, medium to large organizations now use an average of eight different cloud providers for various enterprise apps and services.

We know that our users love having the freedom to choose the tools best-suited for their work—but not the friction of having to toggle between them to get work done. Think of how many steps it takes just to get a contract signed: you have to send someone the contract, they download it, sign it virtually, probably save it somewhere, then send it back to you before you finally save the signed version back to Dropbox.

Increasingly, users are turning to Dropbox to pull together all their content and work tools into one seamless experience. That’s why today we’re introducing Dropbox Extensions, a series of new integrations that let users start workflows—from signing contracts to annotating videos from within our platform.

With Dropbox Extensions, you’ll be able to:

Take a contract from first draft to final PDF to signature with no uploading, downloading, or scanning

Digitally fax that signed contract to its final destination directly
from the Dropbox file

Annotate videos or edit images in Dropbox for real-time feedback
on the fly

Automatically save these updates back to your shared folders,
so your whole team is in sync

These no-fuss workflows are only possible because we’ve built deep product partnerships with leading productivity companies that include Adobe, Autodesk, DocuSign, Vimeo, airSlate, HelloSign, Nitro, Smallpdf, and Pixlr. We want users to have the ability to move fluidly from one task to the next without breaking their flow. It should be just as easy to use a combination of tools and apps as it is to use the same suite of tools from a legacy provider.

Dropbox is home to hundreds of billions of PDF, DWG, and multimedia files, so we’re in a perfect position to connect partners to our users based on the content they’re engaging with. By making it easy for users to find the right tools for the task at hand, everyone wins.

These integrations are a major expansion of Dropbox capabilities, and we’re excited to make Dropbox Extensions generally available to users on November 27. Customers can now use Dropbox as a starting point for actions like PDF editing, eSignatures, video annotation, and more.

Dropbox Extensions is the latest example of how we’re partnering with other best-of-breed tools to make collaboration more seamless. Just last month we announced a partnership with Zoom that will make it easy for users to start a video conference call from within Dropbox or access Dropbox content during a Zoom meeting.

Over time, we’ll add more partners and deeper integrations to our ecosystem. A world with more freedom to choose the right tools and less friction between them is one where we can all do our best work.

Please note: Sometimes we blog about upcoming products or features before they’re released, but timing and exact functionality of these features may change from what’s shared here. The decision to purchase our services should be made based on features that are currently available.